Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment

Face alignment methods have been actively studied using coordinate and heatmap regression tasks. Although these regression tasks have the same objective for facial landmark detection, each task requires different valid feature maps. Therefore, it is not easy to simultaneously train two kinds of task...

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Main Authors: Jaehyun So, Youngjoon Han
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-05-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/10/4731
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author Jaehyun So
Youngjoon Han
author_facet Jaehyun So
Youngjoon Han
author_sort Jaehyun So
collection DOAJ
description Face alignment methods have been actively studied using coordinate and heatmap regression tasks. Although these regression tasks have the same objective for facial landmark detection, each task requires different valid feature maps. Therefore, it is not easy to simultaneously train two kinds of tasks with a multi-task learning network structure. Some studies have proposed multi-task learning networks with two kinds of tasks, but they do not suggest an efficient network that can train them simultaneously because of the shared noisy feature maps. In this paper, we propose a heatmap-guided selective feature attention for robust cascaded face alignment based on multi-task learning, which improves the performance of face alignment by efficiently training coordinate regression and heatmap regression. The proposed network improves the performance of face alignment by selecting valid feature maps for heatmap and coordinate regression and using the background propagation connection for tasks. This study also uses a refinement strategy that detects global landmarks through a heatmap regression task and then localizes landmarks through cascaded coordinate regression tasks. To evaluate the proposed network, we tested it on the 300W, AFLW, COFW, and WFLW datasets and obtained results that outperformed other state-of-the-art networks.
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spelling doaj.art-7307c938d9d24e1a8a2a2226068d10cc2023-11-18T03:11:44ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202023-05-012310473110.3390/s23104731Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face AlignmentJaehyun So0Youngjoon Han1Department of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of KoreaSchool of AI Convergence, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Republic of KoreaFace alignment methods have been actively studied using coordinate and heatmap regression tasks. Although these regression tasks have the same objective for facial landmark detection, each task requires different valid feature maps. Therefore, it is not easy to simultaneously train two kinds of tasks with a multi-task learning network structure. Some studies have proposed multi-task learning networks with two kinds of tasks, but they do not suggest an efficient network that can train them simultaneously because of the shared noisy feature maps. In this paper, we propose a heatmap-guided selective feature attention for robust cascaded face alignment based on multi-task learning, which improves the performance of face alignment by efficiently training coordinate regression and heatmap regression. The proposed network improves the performance of face alignment by selecting valid feature maps for heatmap and coordinate regression and using the background propagation connection for tasks. This study also uses a refinement strategy that detects global landmarks through a heatmap regression task and then localizes landmarks through cascaded coordinate regression tasks. To evaluate the proposed network, we tested it on the 300W, AFLW, COFW, and WFLW datasets and obtained results that outperformed other state-of-the-art networks.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/10/4731face alignmentfeature attentionheatmap regressioncoordinate regressionmulti-task learning
spellingShingle Jaehyun So
Youngjoon Han
Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
Sensors
face alignment
feature attention
heatmap regression
coordinate regression
multi-task learning
title Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
title_full Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
title_fullStr Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
title_full_unstemmed Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
title_short Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment
title_sort heatmap guided selective feature attention for robust cascaded face alignment
topic face alignment
feature attention
heatmap regression
coordinate regression
multi-task learning
url https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/10/4731
work_keys_str_mv AT jaehyunso heatmapguidedselectivefeatureattentionforrobustcascadedfacealignment
AT youngjoonhan heatmapguidedselectivefeatureattentionforrobustcascadedfacealignment